


she's the scary one

by kwritten



Series: Femlash February 2016 [10]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-24
Updated: 2016-02-24
Packaged: 2018-05-22 22:56:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6096658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>while Nikki scours a lake in search a demon leaving behind a trail of dead bodies, Jenny does research of her own<br/>for the prompt: a slow night on the demon-fighting front, an unexpected sight, laughter; without non-con or either woman dying</p>
            </blockquote>





	she's the scary one

**Author's Note:**

> I AM SO SORRY THIS IS SO LATE I AM A TERRIBLE PERSON

“Are you absolutely certain he said _West Clover Lake_ and not… I don’t know,anything else?”

Jenny frowned and tapped her perfectly painted fingernail on the kitchen counter, but didn’t respond. Dragging herself downtown in the middle of a blizzard to get assistance with something that _usually_ would have been the most ridiculously easy task had been demeaning enough, being told that all of that work and magick and energy had been _wrong_ somehow?

No.

“What the--?!”

Jenny pulled the phone away from her face as Nikki let out a string of muffled curses. Outside, the wind howled and what sounded like hail began beating against the windows. She closed her eyes and hoped it was just a heavy rain. If it was hailing out there, she’d never hear the end of it.

“Nik? Just come home.”

“ _THOSE BASTARDS ARE HERE SOMEWHERE._ ”

Jenny walked deeper into the kitchen, keeping an eye on the hallway leading to the bedrooms and said as loud as she dared, “Come home!”

“ _DAMNIT JEN I CAN’T HEAR SHIT I’M COMING HOME THERE’S NOTHING HERE._ ” Something scraped across the mouthpiece of the phone, or else the wind was just that bad out there. “ _I LOVE YOU BUT I FUCKING HATE YOUR MAGICK GUY THIS IS THE THIRD TIME IN A ROW HE’S SCREWED US._ ”

The line went dead and Jenny unwound herself from the black cord before putting the receiver back on the hook attached to the wall in the hallway. She stood there for a moment, head cocked to the side, listening with narrowed eyes before charging purposefully into the living room.

Quickly, with practiced movements, Jenny dragged the coffee table out of the center of the room so that it lined up with the entertainment center, pushed the couch back against the opposite wall, and rolled up the rug away from the dark hardwood floor. A black velvet bag was pulled out of a drawer in the kitchen and from its depths, she retrieved a small piece of white chalk. With pursed lips, she knelt on the floor and began drawing a large, intricate pentagram onto the shiny wood. After a solid twenty minutes, she finally stepped back, eyed her work critically and then nodded her head to no one in particular.

After placing small tea-candles in various strategic locations on the pentagram, Jenny sat down cross-legged in the very center – or maybe a bit more to the left – placed her palms gently on her knees, closed her eyes, and whispered, “Let’s go dick.”

 

 

Nikki sighed and looked out at the unimpressive bog that called itself a lake and then down at her feet. She was covered in mud, soaking wet, and regretting every decision that had lead up to her leaving the house that evening without her car. Not that it felt like hers anymore, since she so rarely used it and it didn’t even house her radio settings anymore; it hadn’t even occurred to her that _not_ taking the bus for tonight’s recon mission was even an option.

It was going to be _super_ pleasant getting on the train in the middle of the night looking like she had just wrestled Nessie. _Especially_ because she hadn’t.

Three hours tromping through the rain and mud and nothing to show for it; no demons, no monsters, no fight she was itching to have. Just rain and more rain and more mud than she even thought possible to inhabit such a small stretch of land.

Nikki glared out at the ~~bog~~ lake and growled a little, smiling at her own temper tantrum. It had been five years and Jenny wasn’t _fully_ adjusted to a world pre-Internet (whatever the fuck that was), but she had never actually failed at anything ever.

Aside from sending herself home, but Nikki was the last person that was going to complain about that fact.

(Maybe the second to last person… depending upon the day.)

And she had people. Good people. Resources. Nikki had a Watcher sometimes, an informant or two that disappeared nearly as quickly as they were made, a good lay now and then. She figured that even if she hadn’t been _The Chosen One_ , chances of her having people the way that other people had people, was probably pretty slim.

Jenny seemed to be the exception that proved the rule. The person that stood by her regardless and managed all of the other _people_ one was supposed to have around you. The dry cleaner, the butcher, the neighbor who needed her plants watered, the mail carrier, the local librarian, the head of the local witch coven, the best occult artifacts supplier in town, the woman who always sold Girl Scout Cookies; Jenny knew all of their names and birthdays and favorite fucking flowers and managed to make it seem like Nikki was part of her relationships with all of them in a way that was disconcerting after so long with only her shadow behind her and danger in front of her.

Nikki eyed the lake and grumbled out a few creative swears she was no longer allowed to utter under her own roof and wished it was just a simple matter of Jenny being wrong about someone. Only she had very good instincts, instincts that Nikki was learning to rely on. If Jenny’s shaman guy or witch or whatever the fuck said that there was a demon in this godforsaken swamp, then by damn there was a demon _somewhere in this swamp_.

She squared her shoulders and squelched forward. Before, she had only been making passes along the edge, everything that they knew about the creature suggesting that it would come find her. Now, she was taking no chances.

It’s not like she could get anymore wet anyway.

 

  
A purple flame encased Jenny as she hummed a tuneless song from her spot within the pentagram, throwing shadows on the dark walls and seemingly extinguishing all of the candles on the ground around her. Jenny blinked out at the flames and then rolled her eyes.

“ _Enough_ ,” she commanded in a clear tone.

The flames immediately retreated like a shamed child, disappearing as she rolled her eyes at the ridiculous display.

Fingers tapping against her leg, Jenny stretched her neck first to the left and then to the right, after a moment arching her back and wiggling her shoulders a bit before relaxing down, letting her shoulders curve in more comfortably. She sighed, “I don’t have all night, you know.”

The transparent apparition of a hunched-over figure in a long, nondescript robe, appeared in the space in front of her (or maybe a little to the right). The apparition was only a few inches tall, and Jenny had to bite her tongue before the phrase _you’re my only hope_ slipped out. She was who she was, but this really wasn’t the time for a flippant pop culture joke.

Wrong audience more than anything else.

“What the fuck, Zey?”

The figure shifted back and forth on its feet a bit, giving off the indication of shame, though Jenny could not (thankfully) see their face. “It’s there!” Zey insisted emphatically. “I swear!”

“Or this is your idea of a joke, sending the Slayer to a marsh in the middle of a storm for kicks.”

Zey shook their head back and forth, “No! I…”

“Zey?” Jenny leaned forward slightly, her eyes twinkling.

Oh she was going to enjoy this.

“Did you know that under any normal circumstances, I couldn’t extract your large intestine through your nose from this great a distance, but since you so humbly accepted my invitation to a chat in my home, you are pegged down, my charming friend.”

Zey gulped audibly.

Jenny cocked her head to the side, “Do you think anyone will hear your screams and come running? Do you have any friends left in this dimension?”

Zey pointed a shaky hand at her, “You are supposed to be the _nice_ one.”

Oh she was going to enjoy this a lot.

“You need to check your sources,” she winked. She found that she caught more bees with sugar than vinegar.

 

  
The demon nest had been in the very center of the swamp, in something that looked like a beaver’s den. Luckily, Nikki presumed that it was just that until _after_ Jenny’s handy little message came.

Having a girlfriend capable of using electrical currents in the air to send one-way messages was handy as hell. If hell got frisky when you visited for Thanksgiving. Or if hell was a person. Or if _handy_ and _handsy_ meant the same thing. Which they didn’t. Maybe hell was more _handsy_ and she should use a new metaphor or whatever.

Did hell have quarterly reports on their effectiveness and efficiency?

Probably. Sounds like something that hell would really love.

If hell was a person and not hundreds of dimensions.

Jenny claimed that soon, people would carry phones around in their pockets, that you could send written messages through them, or through something else? Frustration over the lack of technological development had lead to some interesting magickal shortcuts. One of which was Jenny’s voice in her ear carrying messages wherever she was. Nikki had to find a payphone in order to respond, but Jenny claimed she was working on finding a solution to that.

Which … did she really want to be that person that wandered around downtown in the middle of the night talking to herself? Sounded like that kind of behavior might cause a whole host of new problems and court dates she had no interest in.

Apparently the tragic and bloody and honestly super gross deaths that had plagued anyone visiting this swampy disgusting excuse for a lake had all been contrived by Zey – the creepy little half-demon something-0r-other Jenny kept around for their magickal expertise. Something about a bad game of kitten poker and a millennia-long grudge?

The demon living in the beaver dam was a sweet old family man about the size of a hobbit with a platypus-face and five grand-daughters playing charades in the living room, squealing and giggling like five human teens would. He tut-tutted over Zey’s gambling habits, had a story or two about his wild youth, gave her a shot of something that probably should be used for cleaning car engines and not for human consumption that made her toes feel warm, and helped her scrape some of the mud off of her face and arms before sending her back out into the storm with a promise to send over some casserole his son makes that is _too delicious for this dimension_.

She still got quite a few suspicious looks on the bus on her way home, but it was better than what she was expecting. 

A full three hours later than she had been anticipating, but Slaying wasn’t exactly the type of thing you could really plan any kind of schedule around. 

She should know. 

 

 

Nikki walked through the door – soaking wet and covered in mud – right as Jenny finally tugged the couch back in place, small triangle-shaped indents in the rug guiding her interior decorating. She felt about as exhausted as Nikki looked and as she silently helped Nikki out of her wet clothes in the hallway and into the soft robe she had grabbed from the bathroom when the first sounds of rain pattering against the windows reached her ears, she sent up a silent thank you to her past self living in the future for not accidentally sending her to an age before electricity. 

Her magick had limitations in _this_ time, but a techno-pagan living in a steam-powered age?  
She shuddered. 

It’s not as if she could have known – at _at fifteen_ \- that her misplaced desire for immortality would bounce back against her in such an unforeseeable way. She should have known better, known that it couldn’t be that simple, that there would have to be a sacrifice. She should have paid closer attention to her lessons. Should have never underestimated her own power. 

_Death one moment, but life in another._

She presumed she’d thought of everything. That she’d close her eyes, miss one breath and one heartbeat, and open her eyes in the next. Instead she was flung somewhen else. 

Magick.

“Zey?” Nikki asked, pulling Jenny down to lean next to her on the couch. 

Jenny turned towards Nikki and nuzzled her clammy neck a little with her nose, “Got a very personal introduction to his large intestine.”

Nikki nodded, leaning her head back to close her eyes. 

Nikki never presumed that she was the scary one. There are fists and there is passion and there is a calling and then there was Jenny. 

 

 

Nikki wrapped her arms around Jenny and was thinking very seriously about sleeping on the couch and dealing with showering in the morning when a loud crash came from the back bedrooms. 

They were tearing down the hallway without a second thought, crashing through the door to their bedroom and flicking on the light. Nikki saw Jenny’s open palms flicker with summoned energy out of the corner of her eye, but there was nothing. 

A muffled curse sounded from behind them and Nikki froze. 

“Did you check?”

“At curfew!” Jenny shot back, annoyed and worried. 

Nikki turned and opened the other bedroom door slowly, the light from the hallway pouring in as she did, hitting the figure of a skinny teenager in soaking wet clothes and wide eyes. 

Jenny hit the light switch (or possibly sent her spare energy up to ignite the bulb in the overhead fan in lieu of an attack) and the two women stared. 

Finally, Jenny whispered “Dear gods. Is that a _hickey_ on your neck?”

Nikki grabbed her arm and choked. 

“Sorry for breaking curfew?” 

“ _ROBIN WOOD_!!!?”

It had been way too long of a fucking day for this.

Robin blushed and then squared his shoulders. Jenny hid a smile by ducking behind Nikki’s head. This was always her favorite part. The elaborate story, the excuses, the superhero-level good deed that _must_ be more important than the rules, right? 

“Aaliyah was stuck at work and didn’t have a ride home and look how crazy it is outside _and_ \--“ he paused significantly, “her ex-boyfriend is some kind of crazy stalker. What was I supposed to do?”

Nikki had to hand it to the kid, he made a convincing case, knew all the right things to say, and most of it was probably true, was the most fucking unbelievable part of it. Against all odds, she’d raised a perfectly respectable, adorable (if a little skinny), kind kid. (Who lately was thinking a bit more with something _other_ than his brain but… what teen didn’t?)

“Your mother and I will talk to you in the morning about breaking curfew,” Nikki ground out. “Go take a shower so you don’t catch pneumonia.”

As he passed, she counted the dark circles on his neck and bare collarbone and sighed. 

“Seven hickies,” Jenny whispered after they heard the sound of the shower starting down the hall.

Nikki rubbed her face with her hands, “What are we going to do?”

Somewhere along the way it had stopped feeling like everything in her and Robin’s life was a _what am **I** going to do?_ and became a _we_. She couldn’t exactly say when. But she also couldn’t exactly say that she hated it. 

~~She loved it.~~

Jenny wiggled her eyebrows at her, “Do better?”

Nikki gaped at her for a moment and then burst into laughter. 

When Robin came stumbling down the hall wrapped in a towel, his mothers were sitting in the hallway outside his room, laughing with tears running down their cheeks. He sighed exasperatingly. Seriously, no one in the world had parents more dorky than him. 

Before he slammed the door on them, he muttered something sullen about magick in the living room, which only caused the laughter to grow louder.


End file.
